“So how does $13 billion help solve a $14.3 trillion problem? It helps fills some of the gaps by making the bill more palatable to lawmakers on both sides of the aisle,” Hesseldahl reports. “As one wireless industry lobbyist put it, spectrum auctions are in large part seen as politically neutral territory because they’re not tax increases that Republicans would oppose, and they’re not spending cuts, which so irritate Democrats.”
“Just because spectrum auction revenue is neither a tax increase nor a spending cut doesn’t mean there’s no opposition. Sen. John McCain, the Arizona Republican and 2008 GOP presidential nominee, blasted the plan and called it a ‘cop-out’ from the Senate floor. Meanwhile, Rep. Anna Eshoo, a California Democrat, told Politico earlier this week that the debt bill is the wrong place to debate wireless spectrum,” Hesseldahl reports. “It wouldn’t be the first time that wireless spectrum has figured in the budget-balancing and deficit-reduction process. Revenue generated from spectrum auctions helped then-President Bill Clinton balance the budget in 1993 and 1997, and President George W. Bush used them to help reduce the federal budget deficit in 2005.”
Hesseldahl reports, “What would all that spectrum be used for? The expectation is that wireless carriers like Verizon Wireless and AT&T would bid on it in order to expand their wireless broadband networks, and thus give smartphone users more bandwidth to slake their apparently insatiable digital thirst.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews readers too numerous to mention individually for the heads up.]
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